As usual, he was acting the stunt. Early in the morning on the day of the 2010 election, Nigel Farage turned up at an airfield in Northamptonshire, near to the constituency he was contesting. He was wearing his typical pin-striped suit and a rosette in the plum-and-custard colours of his party. He boarded a two-seater plane, the idea being that it would trail a banner bearing the slogan “VOTE FOR YOUR COUNTRY – VOTE UKIP”. Farage wanted to fly in the passenger seat, even though no one would be able to see him from the ground and the TV companies never broadcast campaign stunts on polling day.
You can’t just stick a big banner on the back of a small aircraft. The plane had to take off, gain some height and then make a deep dive in order to use a grappling hook to grab the banner from between two poles. The pilot finally managed to attach the banner at the fifth attempt only for it to become entwined in the tail and rudder. The aircraft was soon plunging towards the earth at 80mph. “Oh fuck!” cried Farage. He closed his eyes just before impact, convinced he was about to die. The plane smashed into a field, nose first and inverted. When Farage opened his eyes, he was upside down, his face was almost touching the ground and his blood was dripping on to the grass. Another few inches and he would have been dead.
It is smart of Michael Crick to place this near-death experience at the beginning of a gripping and vivid biography. What better illustration that random quirks of fate can change the destiny of nations. Our recent history would have been very different had Farage died that day. Without him, it is much less likely that Ukip would have been transformed from an eccentric fringe into an insurgent force that felt so threatening to the Conservative party that David Cameron was panicked into pledging a referendum on British membership of the EU.
Absent that referendum, there would have been no Brexit. Labour would not have seen its electoral coalition split and smashed at the 2019 election, moderate Tories would not have been purged from their party and the UK would not have become so bitterly divided. Absent Brexit, the premierships of Theresa May and Boris Johnson might well never have happened. No cabinet minister, and arguably no prime minister, of recent times has been so consequential as Farage, a feat the more remarkable because he has many times failed to get himself elected as a Westminster MP.
Crick is a highly accomplished biographer whose previous subjects include Jeffrey Archer and Alex Ferguson. One of his missions here is to examine what fuelled “the extraordinary story of one of the most important politicians of modern British history”. The answer is that Farage’s personality is essentially driven by his lusts and the greatest of them are his cravings for fame, money and sex.
The desire for the spotlight was inherited from his parents. His mother, Barbara, was a vivacious character. In her late 60s and early 70s, she would strip off and pose for fundraising calendars in the style of Calendar Girls. His stockbroker father, the flamboyantly named Guy Justus Oscar Farage, was known as a great storyteller and the best-dressed man on the Stock Exchange. He was also an absentee dad who left the family when Nigel was just five. The trauma of a missing parent is often in the background of politicians who are desperate for adulation.
At the age of 10, he arrived at Dulwich College, a public school in an affluent area of south-east London, where he made a name for himself as a yob with a gob. He and many other boys would get to the school by train. One contemporary recalls being “in awe” of the young Farage’s ability to project spittle across two sets of tracks and hit travellers on the opposite platform. On journeys to the school, the Dulwich boys would take over an empty compartment, wait until the train reached a tunnel, throw the lightbulbs out of the window and “have a massive punch-up in the dark”. The Bullingdon Club would have been proud of them.
Around the age of 16, he experimented with a more dandyish persona, turning up for school in a look-at-me striped blazer, walking around with an old-fashioned cane and keeping a box of snuff. There were highly academic boys at Dulwich College. Around a third of the sixth form went on to either Cambridge or Oxford. Farage was not among them. After mediocre A-level results, he eschewed university altogether. It is my thought (not the author’s) that this helps to explain his contempt for expertise, a Brexiter trait that is especially pronounced in his case. Richard North, an aide to Farage when he was an MEP, tells Crick that his boss hated policy meetings. “He was totally out of his bloody depth. Intelligent people – he was scared of them. He has an inferiority complex about education and highly qualified people.”
While most of his contemporaries took degrees, he became a trader on the London Metal Exchange with the fierce ambition to make “a lot of money”. Another attraction was the many opportunities to indulge in a PFL– a “Proper Fucking Lunch” or “Proper Farage Lunch”. Though his childhood had been blighted by his father’s alcoholism, one of Farage’s conceits is that he can consume prodigious amounts of booze without wrecking himself. Many of the stories in this book, especially the more hilarious or appalling ones, are lubricated with oceans of alcohol.
He had a scare when cancer attacked his left testicle and it had to be removed. His consultant warned him that it was very likely that he would have secondary tumours in his stomach and lungs. As it turned out, the cancer had not spread. When the oncologist turned up in Farage’s room to break the good news, he found him smoking, drinking and on the phone placing bets as he watched horse racing on TV.
Crick, who has an acute eye for turning points, identifies this brush with mortality as an intensifier of Farage’s urge to go into politics. The United Kingdom Independence party, famously decried by Cameron as a bunch of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, had a record of abject electoral failure at this point. It was a small pond for a hungry shark. But it proved to be the perfect vehicle for Farage. In the 1990s, Ukip was populated with men wearing Bomber Command ties. As Crick writes: “Farage, the public school-educated City trader from the borders of London and Kent – a man who loved golf, cricket and fishing, and pottering about first world war battlefields – fitted that southern middle-class profile perfectly.” He soon established himself as the party’s most effective speaker and most tireless campaigner.
The initial breakthrough was the 1999 elections to the European parliament, which saw Farage and two other kippers become the party’s first ever MEPs. The limelight beckoned. His debut appearance on the BBC’s Question Time came in 2000 and Crick quotes analysis that he has since been on the programme more frequently than anyone else in politics. This was not because the production team were secret Farageistes, but because the party’s other MEPs were hopeless communicators, while he could be guaranteed to spout often outrageous polemic to the delight of sympathisers and the enragement of the many who were learning to loathe him.
Being an MEP proffered opportunities to satisfy his other appetites. Just because his speeches depicted the EU as a corrupt racket leeching off ordinary folk didn’t mean he wasn’t going to make the most of the salary and allowances. “I reckon this job in sterling terms is worth over a quarter of a million pounds a year,” he once declared. “That is what you’d need to earn working for Goldman Sachs or someone like that.”
He and other members of the Ukip cadre drank and feasted for England. One favourite restaurant in Strasbourg was À la Tête de Lard (literally, the Pig’s Head). The drinking would go on until three in the morning and sometimes Farage never made it to bed. Colleagues who fell out with him later told stories of champagne being glugged in lapdancing clubs. Crick produces a lively chapter about Farage’s hectic sex life. “Anything in a skirt he would be after,” remarks North. “He’d shag anything that let him.” Though Ukip had banned its MEPs from using their staffing allowances to employ relatives, Farage was publicly accused in the parliament chamber of spending taxpayers’ money on salaries for both his second wife (subsequently separated) and a former mistress.
This generated embarrassing headlines. So did the jailing of several Ukip MEPs for fraud. Rancorous feuds and expulsions regularly convulsed the party, often triggered by Farage’s intolerance of anyone who might compete for the spotlight. The affable pint-supper of a thousand pub-based photo opportunities ruthlessly purged internal critics and potential rivals.
Yet none of this impeded the party’s momentum. Ukip voters either didn’t know or didn’t care that the party was scandal-ridden. It was an instrument, successfully weaponised by Farage’s grievance-stoking rhetoric, to express their discontent with the status quo.
Brexit would not have happened without him, but it is wrong to say that it happened only because of him. The result could have been very different had the foolish Cameron not chosen exactly the wrong time to call the referendum and had not the opportunist Johnson decided to be a Leaver because it best served his leadership ambitions.
Comprehensively researched, fluently written and brimming with both funny stories and jaw-dropping ones, this is the best biography of Farage that will be written. My one complaint is that Crick is so keen to be fair-minded that he is too crimped about making judgments. Take the issue of Farage and racism. The book explores his fascination with Enoch Powell, the entanglements with figures from the far right and the alliances with extremist parties in the European parliament. It chronicles the many occasions, going all the way back to his school days, when Farage has been accused either of outright racism or legitimising it. One of many examples was the notorious Breaking Point poster at the climax of the referendum campaign that Farage launched just 90 minutes before the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox by a white supremacist. The book also rehearses Farage’s objections to being called a racist and his claims to be “extremely upset” by the accusation. It is too limp of the author not to come to his own conclusion.
“Egotism, arrogance, duplicity, dishonesty, hypocrisy, all are attributes Nigel Farage has in abundance,” writes Crick, but weakens this punch by adding “so do many other successful politicians, not least our prime minister”.
He is more nervous than a biographer ought to be about delivering a verdict on what his subject has done to Britain, writing: “Quite how far-reaching Farage’s legacy will be – how damaging or beneficial, or a combination thereof – it’s far too soon to judge.” No, it isn’t. He played an instrumental role in polarising Britain in the most toxic way and urging this country into its worst strategic mistake since the 1930s. And all because he wanted attention.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
• One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
